


How Fast the Minutes Fly Away (And Every Minute Colder)

by isellys



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 13:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isellys/pseuds/isellys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Will father be home for dinner?” Rose asks him, smiling.</p><p>“The term’s ‘bro,’” he says, walking with her through the forest, “and the answer’s fuck no, he’s got a game to catch. Get your head out of your ass and heat those dog meat leftovers yourself.”</p><p>--</p><p>Rose Lalonde and Dave Strider through a lens of sentimentality.</p><p>Or: they worry, as parents often do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Fast the Minutes Fly Away (And Every Minute Colder)

He’s not half bad at drawing when he feels like it.

The lines and the brushstrokes have all the marks of someone who was an artist before one too many remarks about pointlessness and living on the streets with a liberal arts degree got him to put his paints and pens away. Rose guesses that his disillusionment came crashing down on him somewhere during high school. An untimely essay probably initiated the breakdown, with standardized tests coming along to hammer the final nail in the coffin. It’s a shame. Had he actually gotten better at it they would be tracing deep meanings into his paintings by lamplight, and, come morning, doing it with lukewarm coffee souring in their mouths and misty thoughts in their heads.

She’ll make do with what they have, though. Rose curls the corner of the page up in her fingers. It smells like beer and sour candy.

The girl is grinning, her hair curling up in twirls Rose used to dream of. Her eyes are a softer colour than Rose’s own, her nose a perfect image of Dave’s, and her fingers are firm around her brother’s wrist. He’s a stoic image of Rose rendered in sharp polygons. His hair sticks up at strange angles and his shades are even more ridiculous than Dave’s, two triangles joined in the middle, and his mouth almost curls up in a smile.

 _i warned you about the kids, lalonde,_ it says in red ink in the bottom of the page.

She adds, using a white feather quill: _They look rather well-off for two children raised by the worst parents in the universe._

They've been swapping notes, pictures and mixtapes about parenting and children for the better part of two months now. Unbelievably sappy coming-of-age novels found themselves stacked in Dave's mailbox and records of child singers were delivered to Rose's front door. Two copies of  _What to Expect When You're Expecting,_ with suitable doodles and notes in the margins, were exchanged back and forth. Endless parenting books and audiobooks were bought from eBay, boosting the failing economy so the dual presidents can buy themselves more Faygo. Dave and Rose had been talking about the inevitability of children.

The subject, of course, had been brought up during one of their outings. “Rebel-to-rebel bonding,” Dave had called it, turning one of Rose’s thorns around and around in his hand. “If we’re gonna die side by side we gotta fall in love first, Lalonde. Jesus, watch some fucking movies.”

(Dave Strider isn’t really much of a movie buff, but he watched many films and did so with a sense of obligation, as if to honor the last wish of a dead friend.)

They’d been sitting quietly at the bar in some teeny party they’d snuck into, attended by actors and actresses from live-action shows with terrible scripts and even worse stylists. A positive note: teen starlets dressed themselves surprisingly well, and should be allowed to do so for whatever televised crap they got paid to act for. Dave had gone for the irony; Rose, to make sure nothing tragic happened to his white suit. (“Look at you, outdone by your own clothes,” had been her greeting. He had it sewn into the butt of his jeans two weeks later.)

He had brought up the subject of parenting after a drunk fifteen-year-old crashed and stumbled, zeppelin-like, into the pool. About six other similarly smashed teenagers followed, their friends cheering to the lyrics of a Top 40 song.

"We’d be horrible at it. We’d raise an alcoholic and a clinically depressed loner, and blame each other for what they grow up to be,” she had told him.

“Yeah, but. Imagine them, Rose. Two perfect little freaks of nature raised by people who had no business bringing up anyone in the first place, fucking up the place, making Paris Hilton look like a nun who won’t leave the goddamn Vatican because everywhere else is heathen territory,” he’d said halfway through a virgin mojito (again, for the irony). “I smell a bestseller. It reeks like a men’s locker room. Also like shitty childhoods and potty training.”

“That’s exactly what a bestseller smells like. You have the best nose on Earth, and possibly in realms beyond. What creature could possibly beat Dave Strider in a smell-off?”

“No one, unless they had red eyes." He turned to her, face as emotionless as ever. "Holy shit, guess who’s the only guy with red eyes in a twenty million mile radius?”

Rose smiled at him drily.

The teen in the pool was now jumping up and down, splashing the ground not far from Rose’s feet with chlorine and water mixed with sweat. Her friends were still chanting, becoming more off-key with every second. A remix with an erratic beat was playing in the background. Rose watched the way Dave’s feet stayed completely still; at better places he would be tapping them, keeping time, and she would sway with their movement. He then moved his leather shoes farther away from the source of it all, that wretched pool, and, without as much as a word, led Rose away. In less than four minutes they were out the door. If Rose had any other complaints about the way the night went, they were all shoved away in favor of the fact that there was dirt on Dave’s jacket, something she should have been able to prevent. Pointing it out would’ve made him smug, though. She'd have to steal it and dry clean it herself.  

“Kids,” Dave had said, to no one in particular, once they were a safe distance away from the explosion of youth and what was sure to be long-term regrets. “Not like that.”

“Ever the concerned father.”

She wished, suddenly, that he were the type to smile at such a remark. Instead he pulled her towards the good side of town, dirt still on his jacket, and made her eat all-American burgers with litres of ketchup jammed between the buns. 

* * *

Her thorns carve into metal. There are sparks and painful screeching noises; Dave has a pair of green earmuff-looking things on to block out the sound. He’d stolen them from the shooting range. They give Rose the strangest sense of déjà vu but she doesn’t tell him that; she doesn’t know what she misses, and she doesn't care to find out.

When her hands come away the word _Roxy_ has been marked onto the plaque in squiggles. A name much more light-hearted than the ancient-sounding _Rose_. If anything she won’t have to suffer through the line ‘a Roxy by any other name would smell as sweet’, and if the evolution of language does get that far, Rose is glad she won’t be alive to see it. She wonders if she should add the _Lalonde_ , if only as a sentimental gesture, then decides that this whole farce is a big enough expression of uncharacteristically mushy feelings, and she won’t put up with any more of it.

“What will you call him?” she asks Dave, who is tracing his finger over her handwriting absentmindedly, as if it was the skin under her silk sleeves.

“Roxanne,” he tells her.

“Of course. They won’t have to go through high school.” A moment to wonder whether she’d regret the next thing she says. A decision reached: starting a rebellion with Dave Strider and agreeing to name imaginary children together had been rock-bottom. “You could name him Genitalia if you wanted to.”

Dave looks up, scrutinizes her, pale eyebrows knotting together in thought. The temptation to hand him a baby names book rears its head; Rose shoves it back down. If he does name their not-son Genitalia that will be the end of the argument on whether or not Dave Strider should be allowed to raise another human being.

“I’m calling him Dirk,” he says after a long silence.

Rose shrugs, _close enough_. The final word is that Dave Strider should only raise children under controlled conditions, in a lab, supervised by government agents. The _old_ government agents, not the Faygo-powered druggies they have nowadays. Rose could write sonnets about the glory of bureaucracy and miles of red tape. There are haikus to be penned down on the beauty of starched shirts, polygraphs, and having your Miranda rights read aloud. She misses the world when it was still falling apart, not tumbling headfirst into a bad acid trip with seven billion people in tow. She hates that Roxy and Dirk will stand among the ruins.

The unfinished placronyms stand beside two piles of white shirts. There are also sewing machines and extra rolls of fabric; Rose likes to be prepared. Dave’s camera watches them, and he takes a deep breath before turning it on. They both smile at the lens, imagining, for a moment, that what looks back at them isn’t the dead gaze of the camera but Dirk and Roxy, wide-eyed and wonderstruck. They’d be looking at Dave’s apartment. Cinderblocks stand as tables, and there is a pile of premiere outfits in one corner. Rose has her appearance down to within a pixel of perfection, but he hasn’t even brushed his hair and he’s wearing a day-old shirt with apple juice stains on it, his sunglasses slightly skewed on his face, some dried cheese sticking on his cheek. She should’ve insisted on the suit.

“Yo, Dirk,” Dave says to his future son. The sunglasses don’t come off.

“I’m showing you around the house. It’s not a two-story with an underground lab, but you’ll probably still feel the residue of cool four centuries after I die, know what I mean?”

Two hands lift the camera up and bring it around the room, pausing briefly in front of the bed. He fiddles with a knob and zooms into his pillow, then moves it towards his blanket.

“You might wanna burn these sheets first, bro.”

Rose shoots him a look. He shrugs.

“Roxy, if you’re watching this, burn the sheets on your mom’s bed too. Seriously, you don’t wanna sleep in that shit.”

“ _Dave_.”

“Moving on, moving on,” he says to himself, and to Dirk. You open the door for him. The camera is treated to a view of Dave’s living room and the leftovers of last night’s dinner, as well as several empty bottles of apple juice and cheap vodka. No pretenses, they’d promised to each other. We’ll be honest to our children, they’d sworn, under the influence of distant fire in their throats.

Rose can see him holding Dirk’s hand, leading him to the bathroom, pulling him down when he clambers up the lid of the toilet. Old footage will have to substitute for Dave’s parenting skills when the time comes, and there’s something about that that makes Rose feel so helpless it echoes in her lungs.

The lens is pointed at Dave’s window, reflected slightly on the glass: “Man, I’m so sick of waking up to the same old thing every day, but I know it’ll probably be different by the time you watch this, so here. Knock yourself out, bro. You’ll never see this again. Hopefully.”

Outside, the heat makes the scene shiver a little. There are apartment buildings and their roofs stretching out endlessly, coated in bland concrete and bad peeling paint. In some places there are clotheslines being hanged between two buildings; a pair of pants tumbles down into an alley, somewhere, perhaps even surprising an unlucky passerby. The traffic fills the air with its honks and rumbles, the cars painted metal, dented and new, far below. Many of them are tacky things, many of them are worn-out and dying the way only machines can, and a despairingly large number of them are both. Maybe even Dave will rue is sense of irony for letting him settle down here, someday. Some days he is unbelievably proud of how unliveable his neighborhood is.

“The view from here fucking sucks,” Dave adds, when they shoot the front door. “Really, it does.”

* * *

She ends up writing it. Two perfect little freaks raised by people who had no business bringing up anyone in the first place, fucking up the place, making Paris Hilton look like a nun who won’t leave the goddamn Vatican because everywhere else is heathen territory, and their even sadder parents. The ending is tragic but at least everyone lives. Five million copies later, Dave is sprawled on her bed in boxer shorts and that beatific white jacket, his black shirt only buttoned up halfway. There is a halo of light resting atop his white-blonde hair. Rose pretends that when she kisses his head she is meeting angels, in a world where they do not exist and heaven cannot be tasted.

“The nose knows,” he half says, half murmurs to her. “Told you, Rose.”

“You did. I do hope it doesn’t smell like shitty childhoods and potty training, though.”

His copy is a special one with a bonus ending in which everyone makes up and drinks unholy amounts of apple juice under the summer sun. Every page was hand-sprayed with a sickeningly sweet perfume released by a young pop idol, and Rose takes enormous satisfaction in the fact that Dave’s hair now smells just like it.

What they’re doing now is an exercise in casual vanity. Under the morning sun, they prepare sturdy wooden boxes and stuff them with newspaper articles, Perez Hilton print-outs, posts from the blogosphere of teenagers theorizing about Dave’s movies and Rose’s books, and reviews from noted newspapers and conspiracy theorists. Polaroids taken in three-year intervals by one Dave Strider, dug out, systematically marked, and then arranged by their subject, Rose Lalonde. He grabs a magazine page with him on it, the one time he made a ‘Most Eligible Bachelor’ list, and folds it carefully around the edges of his picture. The text is tiny but hopefully young Dirk Strider will know that his father was praised for his ‘diamond dust hair’ and ‘nonchalant mystique’. (Rose had raised a sardonic eyebrow, _the world really is ending, isn’t it_.)

“We are a pair of narcissists,” she says as she carefully places an emergency copy of _Complacency of the Learned_ in Roxy’s box.

“Nah,” says Dave. “We just know how awesome we are.”

With some hesitation, Rose adds her journals to the pile. She’s kept one for each year since she was thirteen; she no longer remembers what she wrote in most of them. Some of them have coffee stains or ripped edges. They’re the only part of the boxes that contain _her_ and not what the world sees her as; Rose hopes Roxy reads them first and most, and again and again as she grows up. The last things to go in are hard drives filled with their videos. Rose monologues on the state of affairs, about the world going to hell, and sprinkles her speech with five hundred metaphors. Dave rambles about Saturday morning cartoons, teenage parties, Rose’s (scary as fuck) eyes, and dirty suits. He shoots videos of himself using his sword; there’s a fifteen-minute footage of him standing in the basic stance.

Rose just downloads self-defense videos from the internet.

Toys end up being one of the many things they would’ve failed at as mother and father. Rose shoves wizard merchandise into Roxy’s chest, confident that any descendant of hers wouldn’t need toys to survive. Dave goes for an assortment of tiny ponies and his vulgar smuppets. One of them has stuffing leaking out of its eye. They both stand back to admire their handiwork, and Rose decides to surrender to the realisation that any child of theirs wouldn’t have much of a childhood anyway.

She whips out her thorns suddenly, making Dave jump. Again it moves in familiar lines, cutting through the surface of her legacy. She imagines the young girl finding it, opening it, getting to know the mother she never had. The image makes her choke on thin air.

 _ROXY LALONDE,_ says deep grooves in dark wood. A tiny bit of the High Chaplain’s blood sticks in the center of the X. Rose doesn’t wash it out.

* * *

It rained outside while they were sleeping. The scent remains long after the thrumming of raindrops on the roof stops, the same way there’s a dent in the sheets even when Dave’s not there. Rose sighs and gathers herself up.

He can be very quiet when he wants to be, but she finds him anyway, a silhouette against a lightning-lit window. His posture is rigid as if on night watch, a sentry during wartime, and Rose wonders whether all this time he had been as paranoid as her, and she never noticed.

“Trouble sleeping, Mr. Strider?”

He doesn’t turn, but she walks up to him anyway.

“Yeah,” he says hoarsely. “I was just thinking.”

“Faygo for your thoughts?”

“Oh fuck no.”

A pause, and Dave shifts just enough to lean on her a little. She feels his hair brush against her skin; it smells like teen star perfume still.

“If it’s any comfort, I didn’t dream tonight,” Rose confides. Dave relaxes a tiny little bit. "Did you?"

“I mean, I don’t have your Raven Simone visions, but I just,” he says, and then stops, swallowing something that might be sorrow.

The silence stretches out between them like the moments before the end of a universe, like the last few seconds on a bomb that’s counting down. Rose recalls waiting to die, looking to Dave, who looked to her, and when the space in front of them lit up blue-red-green, she finally caught a glimpse of his eyes. They had been wide open and scared. She lifts up his shades now. He lets her, and behind them his eyes are tired red rings around tiny black dots. There are different lines around them, lines that weren't there in the vision of Dave that burned beside her, but still the same fear inhabits them. This time it's more tempered, bleeding into his worry for someone else, bursting out of the bubble of his survival instinct.

“You can see it, right? Dirk trying to bake himself a birthday cake and failing really miserably,” says Dave. “Putting thirteen candles on top of the burnt mess, singing ‘happy birthday to me’ all alone in my stupid flat.”

“I’ve thought about it, yes.”

Rose had, in fact, bought Roxy birthday presents for the first twenty-five years of her life, each signed _from your mother_ , in her best handwriting. At least she'll leave a good example behind. Whether or not Roxy chooses to follow it is out of her control, like so many other things. Rose often wishes her daughter's penmanship isn't one of them. To that Dave had said, no, I’ll leave behind a satanic ventriloquist puppet as a surrogate custodian. Screw those parenting books, they were written for nothing but profit anyway. There won’t be a single trace of commercialism in Dirk’s upbringing.

“Maybe that puppet of yours would bake him a decent cake,” Rose says.

“Only shitty puppets know how to bake.”

Dave’s arm is around her waist, and she is now the one leaning against his side, as if they were watching two children playing from a wooden porch. There is no school in the summer and they are always in the yard, running after each other. Come autumn they sweep up the leaves into piles and jump into them, messing them up again. Winter brings bouts of sickness and snow days filled with boredom. In the spring it rains like nothing else, the mud sticking to Dirk and Roxy’s feet, to the pristine floor of their two-story house.

Lightning flashes. It’s dark again. They are alone, and the tiles are cold under Rose’s bare feet.

“Come back to bed,” she tells him. “You’ll feel better about our impending doom in the morning.”

Dave lets her lead him through the hallways, past the windows, under the sounds of the rain that starts again. When they reach the bed he flops down and throws his shades carelessly in the general direction of the dresser. He tries to fall asleep, and Rose kisses his eyelids.

She dreams of Roxy Lalonde.

* * *

“You done, Rose?”

Dave waits outside, impatient. His feet are tapping a beat only he can hear; it is the sound of the second hand on the clock that counts down to their demise. He’s wearing that white suit, sword propped up by his side, and Rose is temporarily tempted to drag him off to some party and wait the day out. The problem with that is that there are no more parties.

“A moment,” she says.

This is the last time she will ever see this house. Rose doesn’t think she’ll miss it at all. What she does regret, though, is failing to clear out the liquor cabinet, even with Dave around. At least it would make decent fuel for a fire, should Roxy ever feel cold by herself. It gets chilly sometimes, and perhaps she'll make snow angels thinking of the person who would've taught her how to sculpt ice, who would've made her hot chocolate as she reads by a fire, who would've put a blanket over her when she falls asleep in the living room. She folds the last of the letters into her wooden box. The latest one contains instructions on how to tie the perfect bow using wide and thin ribbons. ‘How to deal with Striders’ is among the many pieces of wisdom she choose to leave Roxy with in written form. There are recipes, too, and a list of the best apple juice brands that Dave had insisted she include. (“I don’t know why you bother,” she had complained. “None of them will exist by the time she reads this, anyway.”)

“Why are you so eager to die, Dave?” she asks, in a tone one might use to ask why someone prefers apples to oranges. She asks, even though it was her who persuaded him to follow her.

“Might as well get it over with,” he says.

“It’s just like you to say that,” she says, almost fondly.

Rose gets up, smoothing her skirt out and fixing her hair. Her thorns lie in her hand, as if waiting. They are as impatient as her partner, as purposeful, and even more powerless. The only difference between a duel with her thorns in hand and a duel without is the time it takes to end; the outcome itself is a universal constant. She draws it out just so she can enjoy Dave’s company a little longer, even if that company is spent in a hopeless fight with an alien empress.

Rose Lalonde must die, maybe even five times over or more if the universe demands it.

And stubbornly, Dave Strider will follow, his hand a vice-grip on her arm, his sword in his other hand, trying to protect the both of them from something an army of him cannot beat.

From her pocket, she takes out Dave’s drawing. It’s only a little faded, but the expressions of their children are the same. The lines are static, unmoving, still as the dead. Rose touches the image of Dirk, and Dave’s features shift almost imperceptibly. She smiles. Roxy smiles back, but not at her, never at her. One day their happiness will be weightless, perhaps, if they succeed-- _when_ they succeed, where those before them have failed. She resents the universe for forcing  _children_  to fight its battles, her child especially, when it has a ready supply of adults who would fight for it in less than a heartbeat. Perhaps it is fed up with the dark and dreariness that inhabit adult minds and attempts to breed hope in the form of younger heroes; perhaps it just doesn’t care.

There are many things Rose doesn’t care to hope for anymore: the universe knowing what it is doing; her and Dave’s survival; the death of the Condesce before the alternative ruins the world she knows; her presence in Roxy’s life; the idea that she is the most significant Rose that has ever existed. But it is human nature, to hope, and though Rose knows she’s only the recycled remains of a thirteen-year-old girl in another universe, she is still human enough to hope for one thing.

That is that her child will live with the drive to survive flaring in every cell of her being, without mortality swirling in her shadow as she walks, and if it does, Rose hopes that Roxy has the sense to look away from it. Her mother never did.

She sighs. The paper is folded and tucked into her pocket again, where it is home. He holds out his hand for her to take and she does; the way he does it, he might be trying to slip a ring on her finger.

“Will father be home for dinner?” Rose asks him, smiling.

“The term’s ‘bro,’” he says, walking with her through the forest, “and the answer’s fuck no, he’s got a game to catch. Get your head out of your ass and heat those dog meat leftovers yourself.”

“Lovely.”

They leave Roxy’s house behind them. Neither of them look back.


End file.
